Each year I like look to back at some of the books, videos, podcasts, quotes and learnings that I indulged in and which ones really resonated with me the most or pushed me to take action. I am sharing these with you in the hope that you might find they do the same too.

Your comfort zone is a behavioural space where your activities fit a chosen routine that ultimately minimises your stress and risk. It provides you with a state of mental security. The routine is then reinforced because you experience regular happiness, low anxiety and reduced stress. If we are experiencing happiness, minimal to no anxiety and little to no stress, why the f*ck would I mess with that, I hear you say?

Each day is a blessing, not just each new year. Instead of wiping the slate clean each year, we should be taking the lessons from each year and each day into the next. Use each year to continue to build on yourself and grow, not “start again” or be a “new you”. If you do that every year, you’ll be a new person every 12 months. You won’t give yourself the chance to be authentic, or to be truly vulnerable as to what your areas of opportunity for growth are because you are too busy wiping the slate clean to start again.

Why do I think I failed every year? Because I set myself up to fail from the start! I was never invested enough in these “resolutions” for them ever to work. I never had a plan for them. I never knew what success actually looked like. And if these resolutions were supposedly SO important to me, why did I wait to the start of a new year to decide to commit to them?

Often when we talk about career development, we talk about climbing the ladder, or taking that next step upwards, yet often we don’t know what this really means to us. We are conditioned to think that success always should mean a vertical climb, when in all truthfulness, success comes from achieving whatever YOU want to!

Have you ever had a conversation with someone about your goals or your dreams and they look at you with a face like “You must be crazzzzzzy” – you just know they are thinking “tell her she’s dreaming”, and that that long list of ambitions and goals of what you want to achieve in your life is only ever going to stay just that. A dream.